October 2010
"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"You can learn how to be you.... All you need is love."
- Paul McCartney and John Lennon
Sometimes, less is more.
Imagine a dark June night in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and a hillside full of fireflies. At first, each flickers independently. Then pairs, then threesomes, flicker together. Soon tens of thousands flash as one, in rhythm. They have no leader, yet their synchronized light show couldn't be better. Just individual fireflies being themselves. As glorious as these creatures are, they aren't unique.
Nature is filled with self-organized complex systems. Rhythmic breathing synchronizes the heartbeats of a mother and her unborn child. An athlete playing "in the zone" amazes onlookers. Doctors use sandwiches of spontaneously synchronized superfluids (Josephson junctions) to noninvasively pinpoint brain tumors or sources of epileptic seizures. Can independent inventors self-organize, to level the playing field of innovation and compete with big corporations? Albert Schinazi thinks so, and offered to help us synchronize ourselves into a lean mean innovation machine.
The Idea - Intentional Sharing
Spontaneous order goes by many names in the business world - self-organization of complex adaptive systems, chaord, collective intelligence, crowd sourcing, grass roots organization, open innovation, open sourcing, open space technology, self-help groups, wisdom of crowds, etc. In this case of a group of inventors, each person would think and act independently while sharing in a process of deciding how to profitably bring inventions to market.
"Fish got to swim, birds got to fly." - Oscar Hammerstein II
Inventors who want to self-organize need to have two traits. One trait is a commitment to innovate, actively and productively, in one way or another. The more diverse the people, the better. People who know accounting, business, creativity, different technologies and designs, human behavior, intellectual property law, manufacturing, marketing and public relations, product development or distribution, regulations, sales, or anything else related to innovation all have something to contribute.
Dialog
The second trait is a commitment to dialog - to gathering and sharing information about innovation and to working toward a consensus on how to innovate. At each moment, each person is learning (listening), teaching (speaking), or both. Conflicts and mistakes help everyone learn about the environment of innovation (which changes over time) so they can keep trying to succeed. Everyone brings something to the table and shares in the potluck dinner. One person brings two loaves of bread, another three fishes, another only hunger. Sharing multiplies the loaves and fishes so that no one goes away hungry.
How It Works
A meeting facilitator tries to create the conditions that help people self-organize. A day-long meeting might go like this. A facilitator, such as Mr. Schinazi, starts by explaining how the meeting will proceed. He asks everyone for problems that they want people to work on during the meeting, and for a time and place to work on them. Each person then decides which, if any, discussions to attend. Each discussion group works on its problem and decides which post-meeting actions to take. Someone in each group records the important points of the discussion and, by the end of the meeting, the facilitator combines all of the recordings into one summary document. Just before the meeting ends, everyone gets a copy of the summary document and gathers to talk about the highlights of the meeting and the actions they will take.
Examples
Several websites use collective intelligence to solve difficult problems - Article One Partners (improves patents by finding prior art), Breakthroughs to Cures (improves medicine by improving the medical research system), FoldIt (discovers how proteins fold; people of average education outperform computers), Innocentive (solves problems for organizations by expanding their sources of innovation), and Quirky.com (develops product designs).
During a 3-day, 300 person, company-wide strategy conference, an idea from a security guard led to new products that netted Rockport Shoes $18 million during the first year of sales.
Dee Hock, founder and former CEO of the VISA credit card association, used self-organization to build a trillion dollar company.
Learn more about this kind of self-organization at The Chaordic Commons, Open Space World, or StartUp Weekend. If you are interested in self-organizing with other inventors, please contact Mr. Schinazi.
Thank you, Mr. Schinazi for telling us about this interesting topic.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"You can learn how to be you.... All you need is love."
- Paul McCartney and John Lennon
Sometimes, less is more.
Imagine a dark June night in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and a hillside full of fireflies. At first, each flickers independently. Then pairs, then threesomes, flicker together. Soon tens of thousands flash as one, in rhythm. They have no leader, yet their synchronized light show couldn't be better. Just individual fireflies being themselves. As glorious as these creatures are, they aren't unique.
Nature is filled with self-organized complex systems. Rhythmic breathing synchronizes the heartbeats of a mother and her unborn child. An athlete playing "in the zone" amazes onlookers. Doctors use sandwiches of spontaneously synchronized superfluids (Josephson junctions) to noninvasively pinpoint brain tumors or sources of epileptic seizures. Can independent inventors self-organize, to level the playing field of innovation and compete with big corporations? Albert Schinazi thinks so, and offered to help us synchronize ourselves into a lean mean innovation machine.
The Idea - Intentional Sharing
Spontaneous order goes by many names in the business world - self-organization of complex adaptive systems, chaord, collective intelligence, crowd sourcing, grass roots organization, open innovation, open sourcing, open space technology, self-help groups, wisdom of crowds, etc. In this case of a group of inventors, each person would think and act independently while sharing in a process of deciding how to profitably bring inventions to market.
"Fish got to swim, birds got to fly." - Oscar Hammerstein II
Inventors who want to self-organize need to have two traits. One trait is a commitment to innovate, actively and productively, in one way or another. The more diverse the people, the better. People who know accounting, business, creativity, different technologies and designs, human behavior, intellectual property law, manufacturing, marketing and public relations, product development or distribution, regulations, sales, or anything else related to innovation all have something to contribute.
Dialog
The second trait is a commitment to dialog - to gathering and sharing information about innovation and to working toward a consensus on how to innovate. At each moment, each person is learning (listening), teaching (speaking), or both. Conflicts and mistakes help everyone learn about the environment of innovation (which changes over time) so they can keep trying to succeed. Everyone brings something to the table and shares in the potluck dinner. One person brings two loaves of bread, another three fishes, another only hunger. Sharing multiplies the loaves and fishes so that no one goes away hungry.
How It Works
A meeting facilitator tries to create the conditions that help people self-organize. A day-long meeting might go like this. A facilitator, such as Mr. Schinazi, starts by explaining how the meeting will proceed. He asks everyone for problems that they want people to work on during the meeting, and for a time and place to work on them. Each person then decides which, if any, discussions to attend. Each discussion group works on its problem and decides which post-meeting actions to take. Someone in each group records the important points of the discussion and, by the end of the meeting, the facilitator combines all of the recordings into one summary document. Just before the meeting ends, everyone gets a copy of the summary document and gathers to talk about the highlights of the meeting and the actions they will take.
Examples
Several websites use collective intelligence to solve difficult problems - Article One Partners (improves patents by finding prior art), Breakthroughs to Cures (improves medicine by improving the medical research system), FoldIt (discovers how proteins fold; people of average education outperform computers), Innocentive (solves problems for organizations by expanding their sources of innovation), and Quirky.com (develops product designs).
During a 3-day, 300 person, company-wide strategy conference, an idea from a security guard led to new products that netted Rockport Shoes $18 million during the first year of sales.
Dee Hock, founder and former CEO of the VISA credit card association, used self-organization to build a trillion dollar company.
Learn more about this kind of self-organization at The Chaordic Commons, Open Space World, or StartUp Weekend. If you are interested in self-organizing with other inventors, please contact Mr. Schinazi.
Thank you, Mr. Schinazi for telling us about this interesting topic.